“If You Give A…” Peanut Butter Cookies

First of all, excuse the awful color problem in all my photos. I took these with my phone, and the lighting in our kitchen is horrible at nighttime.

If this mouse looks familiar, he’s part of the “If You Give A…” series, by Laura Numeroff. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Cat a Cupcake, Dog a Donut,Moose a Muffin, Pig a Party, Pig a Pancake, and a bunch of other super adorable titles, which you can find here. Anyway, when I was a kid, I had the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and this Mouse Cookies cookbook.

I can’t ever remember making anything in it! Probably because I’m not a cookie person. Don’t get me wrong, if there’s a cookie there, I’ll eat it and I’ll bake them around the holidays, but if I’m going to bake something at random, my first choice is to usually go for a pie, tart, cheesecake, cupcake, or anything chocolate. Now that I live amongst cookie hoarders (Andrew & Lillian), I make them a little more often.

Lillian is all about baking and helping (read: making a massive mess and not helping to clean it up), so she loves this cookbook too. Though, I’ve only made this one recipe from the book, and I’m sure there will be a few more because they’re all super easy.

She requested we make the Peanut Butter Munches… which was great, because all we needed was 3 ingredients. Seriously.

Can I just add that the illustration of the mouse, is exactly what I look like while baking anything? True story.

As you can see from the ridiculously easy ingredients & directions, mix the ingredients in the bowl.

Allow toddler to scrape peanut butter from jar.

Then you just roll them in balls, and smoosh ’em with a fork. Or your hands. Whatever. We did a fork. I like the prong marks. The instructions say to do this while they’re soft, after baking, but I wasn’t sure these would even turn out, so I went ahead and did them pre-baking. But they do bake, so you could probably do the marks afterwards.

Then you bake them at 350 for 10-12 minutes. I started checking mine at 9 minutes, because I was worried these would be runny and moosh together, but I am pretty sure I took them out around 13 minutes. Also, I didn’t get the 36 cookies, only because we made them a little fatter. Oops.

I let them sit in the cookie sheet for a few minutes, then removed them from the cookie sheet onto a cooling rack.

Chow down.

These actually baked really well, for having, like, nothing in them. They’re super peanut buttery, lightly sweet, and a little crispy and a little chewy. These are actually super delish, and I’d consider making these again instead of a regular peanut butter cookie recipe, just because we only had to dirty one bowl and one spoon.